Don't be such a drama queen. "Fracking is Insanity". Well so is mountaintop coal removal, and large-scale hydroelectric projects, drilling for oil, burning hydrocarbons, and nuclear power in general. Why don't we just turn off all the power, and let 99% of humanity die in the resulting chaos? How's that for sanity?

Fracking is no more dangerous than any other source of energy. The risk will be managed, because we can and because we need the energy to survive.

All new technologies involve trial and error, and a certain amount of figure-it-out-as-we-go. Regulations are emerging as the technology is implemented and evolves. Small wild-catters who cut corners are curtailed. We make mistakes and recover from them.

Managing risk is very different from eliminating risk. There can be no progress without risk; the economy does not function without risk. Demand prudent regulation, yes. Punish violators, yes. But please don't demand the elimination of risk, as that is impossible, and always has been.

Natural gas, by the way, is essential in the short term to allow us to shut down coal plants, and in the long term to provide load balancing for intermittant renewable sources of power. We will not manage our climate change problems without cheap fracked natural gas, so embrace the technology and encourage its improvement.

woewiea wrote:
Ohio, stop being a shill for the industry. This article has been up for less then 3 hours and you are fighting mad at anyone who posts.
Fracking can be safe but we all know the industry will cut corners, as it always does, and a massive ecological disaster will happen somewhere.
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I'm not actually a member of the oil and gas industry, but I do work in the chemical industry, and I do manage risks to employees and the public every day, so I have no trouble seeing the perspective of the drillers. We tend not to use terms like "massive ecological disaster" as lightly or with as little precision as you have, but we do spend an enormous amount of time and care complying with regulations, and worrying about safety, health and the environment. If only the financial industry guarded against risks to the economy as carefully as the oil and gas or chemical industry guards against risks to the environment. Yes, BP blundered in the Gulf, but that cost them tens of billions of dollars, which is why things like that only happen every few decades.
There are thousands of dangerous things happening in your world every day to keep our modern world running, and thousands of people are making great efforts to protect you, mostly without you ever knowing. When you go looking hard at any technological endeavour which happens on a large scale, it is not hard to find a potential disaster. The world is full of potential disasters, and most never happen, because we manage the risks. So don't get excited every time you discover a new potential disaster. There are 99 more just around the corner, if you bothered to look. Relative to what was already there, fracking hasn't made our modern world significantly more dangerous.

You be sure to tell the drillers of 20,000 wells what a poor investment they're making. They probably hadn't checked their figures up to this point; when they do, I'm sure they'll stop.

The fracked gas wells have in fact been producing more than had been predicted. The resulting glut has driven gas prices down, but as new users emerge and the predictions improve, the drillers will get it right. Many coal plants are converting to gas rather than retro-fitting with new pollution control devices mandated by the EPA.

I am rarely upset by this newspaper, but this article presents an exception. To claim that the net environmental impact of fracking is positive is downright irresponsible. To begin with, placing water impact and emissions impact on the same scale is like weighing apples against oranges, primarily because we have alternative sources of energy, but absolutely no alternative to water. Further, emissions impacts are diffuse, whereas water contamination can be highly localized, or more widespread. Unless the industry releases information about the chemicals our water supplies are being exposed to, how can we possibly assess the potential negative impact of fracking? This simple answer is, we cannot.

"we need the energy to survive". So, after using up all the coal, oil, available gas and then fracking, what next?

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Ah, the Malthusian question. Well, for one, you'll be dead long before then. For another, as one Saudi oil minister put it, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stone, and the Oil Age won't end because we run out of oil." We won't run out of coal, or oil, or gas. The only resource we've ever run out of have been things we can kill.

All energy derives from the fusion of atoms in the sun, one way or another. In another century we might easily have solar arrays in space beaming down power, or we might have mastered enough technology to pull off fusion power on earth. We also might have a lot fewer people populating the planet. I would bet on lots of solar arrays, probably nano-engineered to mimic the physics of photosynthesis.

I'll give you a few more. Only those who never broke any rule can ask for justice. Only those who possess nothing are allowed to express concern for the poor. The rich who argue for higher taxes for higher income groups should voluntarily pay extra.

Fracking has caused some localized harm to a few farms in Pennsylvania. However, proper regulation can mitigate further occurrences of water contamination. The gas companies are starting to recognize that they can't play fast and loose with the environment, and several of them save their fracking water from one well for use at another. Conservationist measures such as this coupled with rational environmental regulation and regular compliance inspections will result in gas becoming an inexpensive, safe, and comparatively clean form of energy for the near future.

In the long term, we still need to be developing truly renewable energy sources. Regardless of the global warming debate and CO2, there is still a limited amount of fossil fuel available and the process of getting it out of the ground is not entirely clean (and never will be). Given the time it takes for technologies to mature, we need to continue working on a sustainable energy infrastructure now.

C'mon folks... let's promote sensible policies that recognize reality: we need energy AND we need to preserve the environment. We can find solutions that make financial AND environmental sense, if people would stop pointing fingers and shouting whatever hyperbole "their side" has concocted.

The only clownish thing here is your oddly inaccurate caricatures. Obama isn't socialist and the EU really couldn't care less what we frack.

The EPA has a job to do in enforcing the environmental regulations we the public want. You (and I) might not agree with all of them, but I for one don't want to return to the days when GE dumped dioxins in the Hudson and rivers actually burned.

Gasland is an abominable Smear Campaign. Josh Fox, The film's director, has openly admitted that he disregarded facts in order to present hydraulic fracturing in a more negative light.

The film makes numerous factual misstatements, such as its claim that the natural gas industry is exempt from the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act. It routinely misrepresents the fracking process, its impacts on the environment, and government regulators’ views on the practice.

Nearly every claim about fracking has been based on dubious science and promptly repudiated.

I'm guessing you don't differentiate between dissolved gas in water and free gas ?

Dissolved methane in water is at a level that isn't going to burn let alone explode. Free gas might if it mixes with oxygen but I don't recall anyone talking about problems with free gas in drinking water.

So yes I'd not be bothered drinking water with dissolved methane in it. And as was noted by another poster, methane already in naturally present in much of PA well water.

So, you don't mind if your water can explode? And you would actually consider drinking methane polluted water? Please go ahead and drink up then. But you have absolutely no right to expect others to do the same.

Can one of you environmentalists types crusading against the process that has North American on track for energy independence by 2020 please provide a coherent argument against it other than "Nothing bad has happened...YET"?

Keep in mind, this must be a reason that outweighs the positives. Positives like the revitalization of the petrochemical, steel, fertilizer, and plastics industries which once provided tens of thousands of jobs in the US. Or the fact that power companies are voluntarily shutting down coal plants in favor of cheaper gas plants which produce about 30% of the carbon of coal. Or the fact that now CNG fleets are being built to reduce the economy's dependence on oil.

Natural Gas=good, Carbon=bad. You had me until you brought up carbon trading, which helps the environment much like gambling helps the sports industry. It does nothing whatsoever to curb pollution, it's just a boondoggle designed to make the tax collectors rich and the consumers poorer by making everything- and I mean everything- more expensive.

Another important fact is that the developing world- if China and India can really be called such anymore- are the big polluters of today and the future. Unless someone starts a successful Grippie (Green Hippie) movement in those nations the world won't see much change in the anthropocentric climate change effects. Three billion people driving cars, using air conditioning and charging cell phones will produce more "carbon" pollutants in the next century than the world has seen in Human history.

One last point- the Grippies are opposed to burning fossil fuels, but don't seem to have a problem with legalizing, and thus exponentially increasing the burning of the ganja, which produces lots of carbon if the cloud over California is any indicator. It just goes to prove the point that climate change is just a crisis-of-convenience. Thus Natural Gas=bad, Grippie High=good.

You rescue this article in the last paragraph (and I agree on a Carbon tax), however on balance I disagree that Fracking is a positive development. It artificially lowers the cost of the competition for genuinely sustainable alternative energy sources. This means that they can't roll out in the volume needed to drive costs down to long term economic levels. 100 years is a very short time in anything other than a narrow minded economist's point of view, and we can irreparably harm the planet in that disastrous window of opportunity.